Congress Smashes Pentagon’s New Den of Spies

If the Pentagon’s not careful, it’s going to find its new network of spies rolled up by Congress.

The Defense Clandestine Service was supposed to be the Defense Department’s new squad for conducting “human intelligence” — classic, informant-based spying. The idea was to place up to 1,600 undercover operatives and military attachés around the world, collecting tips on emergent battlefields. The problem was that the U.S. already had a human intelligence crew: the CIA. Almost immediately after the Defense Clandestine Service was introduced, an array of outside observers began to loudly question its value.

Add the House Armed Services Committee’s intelligence panel to that list of skeptics. In its revision of next year’s Pentagon budget (.pdf), released Tuesday, the representatives said they would withhold half of the DCS’ funding until the Pentagon proves that the service “provide[s] unique capabilities to the intelligence community.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which runs the DCS, is trying to cast the move as a positive one for the service. “We appreciate the HASC’s support in allowing us to proceed in meeting [our] mission, and we welcome the HASC’s language that will allow us an opportunity to demonstrate further that we are proceeding smartly and as good stewards of taxpayers’ money,” Lt. Col. Thomas Veale, a Defense Intelligence Agency spokesman, tells Danger Room in an e-mail.

“From the very beginning, we have been continuously engaged with our oversight committees to reassure Congress that our efforts are within the scope of our unique defense intelligence mission,” he adds. “We have also been coordinating closely with our IC [intelligence community] partners to ensure that Defense HUMINT [human intelligence] capabilities remain complementary and not duplicative of other agencies’ capabilities.”

But despite the pleasant words, it’s clear that the Congressional cut is the latest jab in a decades-long knife fight between the Pentagon and Langley (and their backers) for control of America’s spies.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is traditionally tasked with figuring out the number and type of hardware America’s military adversaries have. Think Syrian missiles, Russian tanks, or North Korean artillery. But in recent years, the Defense Intelligence Agency has assigned to itself a new role: less analytical, and more operational. While the CIA has turned more and more to hunting terrorists in the hottest warzones, the thinking went, the DCS could develop sources in the places where the next fight might go down: China and Iran, for sure. But also countries like Yemen, where unemployment is high, and so are the number of criminal gangs looking to recruit. “That’s a fundamentally different kind of enemy to understand,” said Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who inherited the DCS program from his predecessor but quickly embraced it in public. “Somebody who feels no hope is different [from] someone who puts on a uniform and decides he’s going to be your enemy… We have to have a different mindset to deal with it. We have to be able to go into these environments … with a much different level of preparation.”

The logic would be a little easier to accept, if the Pentagon and the CIA hadn’t merged some of their human intelligence (“HUMINT”) forces just six years earlier. In May of 2006, the Defense HUMINT Service was dissolved,and many of its spies were sent over to the CIA, which combined the new personnel with its old Directorate of Operations to form the new National Clandestine Service. Brig. Gen. Michael E. Ennis, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s HUMINT chief, was named the No. 2 at the service. “And a senior Marine general always serves as the NCS’ deputy director to ensure that the NCS stays focused on military targets of interest,” notes intelligence historian Matthew Aid.

It’s one of the reasons why Aid says he “still does not understand the need for the Defense Clandestine Service. It duplicates what NCS is supposed to provide.”

“Multiple studies since the end of the Cold War document these deficiencies, and they led … to [the] recommend[ation of] transferring to the Central Intelligence Agency all responsibilities for the clandestine recruitment of human sources.”

In Tuesday’s markup of the defense budget bill, the House Armed Services panel wasn’t quite so harsh. But they did withhold half of DCS’ proposed budget for next year. And they required the Pentagon to do more than just promise that things would be better this time. If the subcommittee’s version of the bill becomes law, the Defense Secretary will have to “design metrics that will be used to ensure that the Defense Clandestine Service is employed in the manner certified” and provide every 90 days “briefings on deployments and collection activities.”

The Secretary of Defense has responsibility and authority by statute and Executive Order to conduct intelligence collection and to ensure it has the capability to satisfy the overall intelligence needs of the Department of Defense. DCS is focused primarily on the unique strategic HUMINT needs of the Secretary of Defense, the Combatant Commanders, and the Service Chiefs.

Defense News’ John Bennett argues the restrictions are relatively mild, and therefore indicate House Republican support for the DCS. (It’s a counterintuitive suggestion, given that no other program was so restrained by the intelligence panel.)